Bloody Third.

I think that the Historic Third Ward as National Register Historic district is a positive. The Third Ward is attractive in a unique way and sort of sets itself apart from the rest of Milwaukee. The Third Ward is a small quaint gem that the greater city of Milwaukee is able to cherish thanks to the preservation of some of the buildings and uniqueness of the area.

It seems to me that the strengths of the design guidelines for the Historic Third Ward are clear. All intentions for preserving and keeping the district distinct and attractive for tourists and people within the community are respectable. By analogy, a pearl has value. A string of graduated pearls, however, has value that far exceeds the value of all the individual pearls. (Murtagh) I think that is a very strong analogy that Murtagh makes about preserving districts and not just singular buildings. If developers were aloud to come into the Third Ward and build a twenty story high-rise building, the district would begin to lose that feeling of locality that Murtagh mentions that is important to the mood that a historic district promotes.

With that said, there are A LOT of design guidelines regarding buildings and environments in the Third Ward. It is important to be strict if your goal is to maintain locality and a sense of history within an area, but one of the rules that struck me as overboard was the expression line guideline which states: “as a result of the traditional attention paid to concepts such as base, middle, and top, there exists strong horizontal expression or architectural control lines throughout the District. These lines should be respected for all new construction.” This means that if a new building needs to maintain the same/similar expression lines to the building adjacent to it. I don’t entirely understand why this would cause a hindrance in design consistency within the Third Ward even if the architecture and facades are similar to one another.

In conclusion, I think that Milwaukee has done a fairly descent job of trying to preserve the quaint little area and rebuilding it as an area where we can feel safe and somewhat secluded from the rest of the city. As an area of the city once known as the ‘Bloody Third’ (“About The Historic,”), due to its reputation for many colorful fistfights, I think that the area has come a long way.

About the historic third ward. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.historicthirdward.org/about/aboutthethirdward.php

Murtagh, William. Keeping Time, The History and Theory of Preservation in America. 3. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons Inc., 2005. 91-95. Print.